You never posted your home address online. So why does typing your name into Google pull up your address, your age, your relatives, and a phone number you have had for years?
The plan · 5 steps
Data brokers. Their entire business is buying, scraping, and reselling personal information. They pull from public records, old accounts, store loyalty cards, and other data they buy, then package it into a profile and put it on a people-search site like Spokeo or Whitepages. Anyone can look you up for a few dollars. You never agreed to it, and most people have no idea it is even happening.
What this guide gets you: see exactly what is exposed about you, get your info off the big people-search sites, use Google's own tool to scrub search results, and have Claude draft every takedown request for you.
Set your expectations honestly. You cannot erase yourself from the internet completely, and anyone promising that is selling something. What you CAN do is remove the large majority of your exposed personal info and make yourself much harder to find. That is the real win, and it is what this guide gets you.
By the numbers: hundreds of sites may list you, $0 to remove yourself, one afternoon to clean up. Almost all of it can be removed for free. It takes patience, which is exactly where Claude comes in. It cannot log into these sites for you, but it can write every removal request, deletion demand, and takedown notice so you are not staring at a blank page. You paste, you send, you move on.
See What Is Exposed
You cannot clean up what you cannot see. Fifteen minutes here tells you exactly what to target.
Prompt: map the search
Tip: Keep a simple running list as you go: site name, what it exposed, and the link. You will hand pieces of this to Claude in the next steps, and it keeps you from doing the same site twice.
Scrub Your Google Results
Google built a tool specifically for this, and most people do not know it exists. It finds search results that contain your personal contact info and lets you request removal in a few taps.
What qualifies: Google will remove results that expose things like your home address, phone number, email, or other contact and identifying info that could be used to reach or identify you. It is aimed at your personal contact details, not general mentions of your name.
Prompt: Google removal request
Heads up: Getting something out of Google search does not delete it from the website hosting it. That is why the next step, going after the source sites directly, matters. Do both.
Opt Out Of The Data Brokers
This is the heart of the cleanup. These people-search sites are where your address and phone actually live. Each one has a free opt-out. It is repetitive, so this is where Claude earns its keep.
Start with the largest, since their data feeds a lot of the smaller sites:
Prompt: build my opt-out plan
Prompt: draft a deletion request
If you are in California or Europe, say so. Strong privacy laws give you extra leverage. California residents can cite the CCPA right to deletion; people in the EU or UK can cite the GDPR right to erasure. Tell Claude your location and it will reference the right law, which gets requests taken more seriously.
Tip: Doing this by hand is free but tedious, and brokers re-list you over time. If your time is worth more than the hassle, paid services (the DeleteMe / Optery type) automate the opt-outs and keep re-checking. Totally optional, but worth knowing it exists.
Get Your Photos Taken Down
Photos are their own thing. Getting one removed depends on who owns it and where it is posted, so match the method to the situation.
If you took the photo, you hold the copyright. A selfie or a picture you shot is yours. If someone reposted it without permission, you can send a DMCA takedown notice to the website or its hosting provider, and they are legally expected to act on it. This is the strongest tool you have for your own images.
Prompt: DMCA takedown notice
If it is on a social platform. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the rest have built-in reporting for photos of you posted without consent, and for impersonation. Use their report tools first, it is the fastest path. Claude can write the explanation you paste into the report.
If someone else owns the photo. If a photographer or company took it, you may not hold the copyright, so DMCA may not apply. You can still ask the site to remove it as a personal privacy request, and many will.
Prompt: photo removal request
Google can hide outdated photos too. If a photo was already taken down from a site but still shows in Google, use Google's "Remove outdated content" tool to clear the leftover result. Quick cleanup for images that are gone from the source but hanging around in search.
Keep It From Coming Back
Cleanup is half the job. The other half is closing the doors that let your info leak out in the first place, so you are not doing this again in six months.
Prompt: build my lockdown checklist
Set a reminder. Brokers slowly re-add you as they buy fresh data. Put a recurring reminder on your calendar to re-run your name search every few months and re-opt-out of anything that crept back. Twenty minutes, twice a year, keeps you clean.
The One-Page Cleanup Checklist
The prompts worth saving:
You cannot vanish completely. You can get a whole lot harder to find.